High under the pew: A critical meditation on Joseph Winters’s Hope Draped in Black

What if “heaven is all goodbyes?”

What if a certain promise land was given only in its failure and what if that failure was also the shape of its promise? In Tongo Eisen-Martin’s (2017) collection Heaven Is All Goodbyes, the poet offers poems as forms of broken heaven/s, as forms of miraculous, “terribly beautiful” togetherness (Moten, 2003: 5). Fleeting often vulnerable, often ethereal, im/possible togetherness. In the third poem to appear in his volume, “I have to talk to myself differently now,” the narrator makes togetherness of themselves, of themselves as beside themselves, as someones they talk to and to which they feel a responsibility. A “black commons”:

“I am not an I.

I am a black commons.”

I am writing out my new tattoo on bus station glass

making tattoos all afternoon

talking myself into seeing the decade through

under my skin, they call a tattoo the sky [. . ..]

no one on the street has a job

and therefore

no one is there (Eisen-Martin, 2017: 16). ¹

On the outskirts of the “I,” which is also a bus station, some other kind of fleshly writing takes place—under the skin and above the bone. A cutting-writing that makes a sky underneath, a sky for a black commons, a sky no one sees. The lightless place where the job less, overinscribed and overwritten, are neither seen nor alone. As Rachel Zolf (2011) instructs us, through a poetics of listening and an openness to being moved: “the Noone is someone, many ones, a social “structure of feeling” (Raymond Williams 131) that can be powerful when harnessed.” ²

I digress, which is often the case, as the writing here is meant in part to center and pay tribute to Winters’s (2016) recent Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress. Still. Winters’s book is, in some ways, about those neither seen nor alone, to which Tongo Eisen-Martin also attends by not. And what is more, if poetry, following the late poet Larry Levis (2013), is something akin to a “writing it Out” then it’s only fitting, only failingly fitting, that a celebration of Winters’s Hope begins with some kind of out-writing among those on the outs, at that bus station, on the bus with no one at all. We might say that “writing it Out”, a living and crafting, a loving and holding onto what’s on the outs, in the outs, that thrives on the outside of the “in,” what’s in time/space, the progressivist movement of an amnesiac history in denial, is what Winters’s book turns to and is animated by. As with Tongo Eisen-Martin’s poem “I have to talk to myself differently now”, Winters philosophizes alongside other Black writers and philosophers to offer another glimpse of hope untethered to the regulative, annihilating, progressivist, amnesiac, abnegating violences of the self-same. The ones that pound the earth and each other while marching toward the light, the right, the true, the self; the ones that deny their own un-upliftable multiplicity and consign its death to the ones beside themselves, humming inaudibly together on that passengerless bus.

Listening to the music generated by the communion between Eisen-Martin’s poetry and Winters’s prose, we appreciate how despite that forward-driven, propulsive movement of hegemonic rhetorics of progress and uplift, some no ones gather on the sides of roads. In a minor key, among others evicted and trampled over, shards of glass and some trammeled rose, what Winters calls a melancholic hope, a hope draped in black, is sung. As Winters might argue here, even as linear progress and forward movement requires that certain presences be cast aside from the realm of meaning, recognition, and value, social life is over and over again remade by junkies under the pew. Or, on a forgotten day, socialities formed in the roadside ditch sew other kinds of love, all the while caressing the bruised earth, letting it know it’s remembered. Or. As hegemonic hope forgets those who remember otherwise, intractable memories along with bruised earth are harbored and held differently. Vulnerability itself isn’t forgotten but shapeshifts like the bludgeoned tulip into a makeshift pillow, supporting those not ready to battle with weary bootstraps. Importantly, powerfully, Winters (2016) attends to these other ecologies, these other enactments of social life against hopeful forgetfulness by “draw[ing] attention to the black literary tradition as a discursive site that both troubles collective attachments to progress and that puts forth conceptions of hope and futurity that are mediated by melancholy, loss, and a recalcitrant sense of tragedy” (pp. 6–7).

Engaging, among others, the important work of Anne Anlin Cheng, who defines melancholy, after Freud, as “so persistent and excessive in the remembrance of loss that that remembrance becomes part of the self,” Winters puts forth a notion of hope as similarly a being broken by brokenness (Cheng, 1997: 50; italics author’s). In his book, a black aesthetic inhabitation of hope (a hope that remembers anti-blackness’ ongoing presence and threat) advances a vitality in vulnerability, and with it, histories and practices of “para-ontological,” “para-theological” social life more common to the story of black survival than otherwise offered. ³

Winters joins Eisen-Martin in seeing black common life in bus station glass, moving in melancholy’s invisible passage and its dismissed ecologies of a “refusal to coalesce” (Moten, 2015). That is, following Winters’s engagement with Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, if a narrative and ontotheology of hope depends upon, “instrumental reasoning convert[ing] nonidentity (difference, contradiction, suffering) into material that can be controlled and managed,” the not/one, nonidenticals, who stay behind, mismanaged, might have something to say about holding on while “being otherwise” (64; Moten, 2008: 1747).

Returning to Eisen-Martin’s poem, the “black commons” of I have to talk to myself differently now lingers behind and sideways, not forward and backward, in the world. Maybe in the bus station glass, some punctured, broken, goodbyed heavens beckon, w/holy celestialities that have always been there, even if unwritten. Or, following Joseph Winters, what Black literatures instruct and reveal are the cosmological openings for the unharborable and unsavable, a kind of celestial transit depot for the structurally and socially ended, a “broken beautiful” no place residing somewhere east of the pearly gates (Gumbs). ⁴ Listening to Eisen-Martin and Winters together, maybe this heaven that is all goodbyes is neither upward nor forward but ambles in the open closings (down, below, and sideways) engendered by vulnerability and insecurity. To be clear, this isn’t a romanticism of insecurity but it’s an ethical openness to the possibility that the trembling of the unassured, the more-than-one whose flesh can’t stop seeing and shaking, can tell you not only something about what’s (always) coming but also how to survive it. Maybe what the unsure, incoherent, shaky ones hold are rickety shields made from knowing the score and playing it otherwise, safeguarding themselves from the ones trying to keep them settled.

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney speak to the violence of settlement, the deep, world-historical imbrication of (perversely hopeful) settlement with modernity’s anti-black, ableist, and colonialist conditions.

They write, “Never being on the right side of the Atlantic is an unsettled feeling, the feeling of a thing that unsettles with others. It’s a feeling, if you ride with it, that produces a certain distance from the settled, from those who determine themselves in space and time, who locate themselves in a determined history. To have been shipped is to have been moved by others, with others. It is to feel at home with the homeless, at ease with the fugitive, at peace with the pursued, at rest with the ones who consent not to be one” (Harney and Moten, 2013: 97).

The unsettled, those who were “nowhere at all,” are maybe now the shaky ones (Spillers, 1987: 72, italics author’s). Those who understand what it is to be treading many broken planes at once, the hurtful past and present along with that invisible future traced in bus station glass. Those who know that sometimes hope arrives in the violent form of re/settlement-an insistent settling of the shaky, a holding up of heaven while killing the earth. Those who harbor and protect minor wishes instead, attend to “[an] openness, [d]issonance, [r]esidual informality” that Moten (2015) calls poetry. A song sung by the shakes, in brokenness, in choral arrangement and derangement, among friends beside themselves, vulnerably optimistic, high under the pew.

My love and appreciation for Joseph Winters’s book, Hope Draped in Black, is connected to the love I have for those minor hopes in poetry, for the spaces they make around broken pews, in “marginal church[es],” “bent school[s],” with sounds that don’t easily accrue to the gospels of reason or forgetfulness (Moten, 2008: 1747). Winters’s hope is seemingly a non-committal anchor thrown down to keep company with (not save) the no/one who can’t be upright when they’re called, who maybe stays disappointed and maybe even feels good while down there. And here I wonder: maybe we need to unmoor direction from morality such that down there blooms without explanation; under the broken pew, in the abandoned church, a little garden grows. . .or maybe the garden flourishes in an opiate spill or in the graze of wind against a cheek. Down there, Winters philosophizes, “melancholy is an ethical attitude and disposition that is not antithetical to hope for a better world. . .it engenders vital dispositions, attitudes, and desires–a critical gaze toward the social order, heightened awareness of those bodies and objects, mutilated by the social order, sensitivity to the disavowed relationship between freedom and violence, and hope for a different kind of existence” (Winters, 2016: 22).

Following Winters, I ask: how do we think the vital disposition as precisely a different comportment toward the vital, one that doesn’t require the whole, complete, upright body as a harbor but that regards vitality as what seeps into the edges of the bent and vulnerable already held tightly– brokenly in embrace. Tongo Eisen-Martin poeticizes this ethics of which Winters celebrates and advances in a kind of non-advance to the forgotten one, a “public bus” friendly gesture, a suggestion of shared besideness, a “being [together] otherwise” (Eisen-Martin, 2017: 65; Moten, 2008: 1747).

The poet pays tribute to the afterhours churches and reluctant congregations glowering in broken lightbulbed poems like “Snuck Between Pews Too.” A poem whose “so and so” friendly appeal hums from the paraontological place of being’s alley, roadside ditch or “vestibule” where the beside themselves narrator, or telerator appeals to the “junkie” (Eisen-Martin, 2017; Weheliye, 2014: 44):

Pace yourself, junkie/That’s not a pedal/Nor floor/That’s a heart rate.

[. . .]

don’t worry

this is the page that nobody’s paying attention to

last-minute heroine breaks

between new friends

public bus friends

so and so is your so and so friends

go meet the easygoing side door

with a funny story and all the money

here’s your half of the river

stay as long as nobody calls

hold your own head

but don’t be nervous

around here we all get sleepy at the same time (p. 64–65).

In the portion of the poem “Snuck” titled “When the Sermon Ends,” there’s inexplicable togetherness where “no-bodies” neither attend nor call (da Silva). The telerator, the one besides themselves extends a hand, to the junkie, the one whom holds onto what one’s supposed to lose and toss aside-junk. The junkie always remembers, has friends “. . .public bus friends. . .so and so friends.”

After the sermon ends, being beside oneself is a page and party “no-body” pays attention to (da Silva, 2009). Maybe together in that unattended and upturned pew, social life is resung once the sounds of salvation eviscerate into the other “half of the river.” In this poem, the telerator isn’t a priest but a “so and so.” A friend of a friend, maybe, who doesn’t try to rehabilitate or uplift, or put back to work, but to suggest that maybe they pace themselves: Pace yourself junkie/That’s not a pedal/Nor floor/That’s a heart rate.

A hand is extended to someone who isn’t but still sees their skin in glass. Perhaps, the invisible bus riders’ tattoos know something about the junked and junkie’s unseen cuts, the life that cruises unseen in panes of glass, anaerobically in polluted rivers. Maybe a minor hope, if we listen to what Winters writes, is neither curative nor rehabilitative and comes out of staying with the hurt. It’s a hope de/formed by a listening to what’s stifled by the suture, listening to what’s stifled by the sermon. Winters writes: “[The] wound is both a mark of being torn or injured and an indication of an opening toward others, a signal of a heightened sensitivity to the world” (p. 230).

Along with Joseph Winters, Terrion Williamson has important words for those making invisible wishes and worlds in the face of expectant death and dismissed life, for those whose living and dying “rarely receives much media attention, especially when the story is about how to save their lives as opposed to how we can go about holding them responsible for every social ill we can conceivably (or inconceivably, as the case may be) pin on them” (96, italics author’s). In her vital research on the relation between socially mournable violence and the murder of black women engaged in prostitution and drug use, otherwise self-understood as “in the life,” Williamson (2015) writes: “It might help us to at least consider the possibility of addiction as refusal, as a fugitive existence, that is, in the words of Jack Halberstam, ‘separate from the logical, logistical, the housed and the positioned.’ It is to say ‘being alive is the hard part,’ but because I want to stay alive I have to flee into something that may kill me. Here, then, is the unspeakable thing. Not just the possibility that one could be kept alive by the same thing that is killing you, but that this fragile positionality beckons toward another kind of space, a space in which invisibility has a certain kind of purchase” (p. 107).

These other spaces and socialities, under the pew, on the other side of the river, in the spill and fall out, in the “terribly beautiful” realization that “being alive was the hard part,”—all of it and none of it is celebrated in a “hope draped in black” (Morrison, 1987: 8; Moten, 2003: 5). Winters’s book is an offering, an honoring, a flower at the side of that river and a scattering of petals broken on the church floor. It is a gift that glitteringly appears like failed promises in bus station glass, helping you hold onto and believe in “what you do not remember” (Baldwin, 1985: xiv). Revealing that even in the forgotten place, there’s a crooked, resilient bloom.